Republicans' turn to paint themselves into a corner

That's the question that sensible Republicans should be asking themselves in the wake of this week's shutdown of the federal government. To use the (unfortunately, accurate) characterization employed by many Democrats, Republicans are like the dog that's caught the car – confused and wondering what they were doing in the first place.

This is a mess of the GOP's own making. The same Republicans who ridiculed President Obama a few weeks ago for painting himself into a corner on Syria managed to do precisely the same thing on Obamacare.

This fight began when a band of congressional conservatives determined that they would make keeping open the federal government contingent on defunding the president's signature health care initiative. As the more intellectually honest proponents of the plan conceded, that was an impossible goal. Democrats control the United States Senate, and the author of health care reform still sits behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. There was no plausible sequence of events that would end with Barack Obama presiding over the evisceration of his signature policy accomplishment.

So why engage in this process if it was clear from the outset that it would be a legislative death march? None of the Republican rationales hold much water.

Some conservatives argued that the president and congressional Democrats would be forced to come to terms because of Obamacare's widespread unpopularity. That owes, however, to a wishful reading of the polling numbers. It's true that the program is in bad odor with the voters – but not everyone opposes the law for the same reasons as do conservatives. A CNN poll conducted earlier this year, for instance, found that 50 percent of the public opposed Obamacare – but 11 percent objected on the grounds that it was not liberal enough. Those voters, many of whom likely hope that Obamacare will simply be a weigh station on the road to single-payer health care, were never going to hoist the defund banner.

Republicans have also been seemingly unable to grasp the fact that process can matter to the public just as much as outcomes. One of the reasons that Obamacare has had a whiff of illegitimacy since its passage in 2010 was the imperious style in which Democrats forced it through Congress, bypassing the 60-vote requirement in the Senate and ignoring Republican objections. The public doesn't seem to think that forcing a fight over Obamacare into the budget process is any more legitimate, with 72 percent of Americans surveyed for a Quinnipiac poll released this week saying they opposed the tactic.

The upshot of this effort may well be the GOP snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. In the wake of the shutdown, that same Quinnipiac poll shows Democrats with a nine-point advantage over Republicans for next year's congressional elections, the highest gap yet measured. What the defund caucus doesn't seem to realize (or simply doesn't care about) is that there is a wide swath of ideologically uncommitted voters whose biggest objection to Washington is that it never seems to work. When they see one party headed blithely towards a government shutdown, the obstruction becomes more salient to them than the goals it's intended to accomplish.

The pity of all this is that the GOP had tactically sound ground to claim. The concessions they tried to extract after the defund effort failed – such as delaying the individual mandate for a year or repealing the medical device tax – would have enjoyed wide public support had they been the focus of negotiations from the start.

Instead, Republicans dug in their heels on an unworkable moon shot. As a result, they're now paying a political cost with no offsetting policy victory. And, by damaging their prospects for next year's elections, they may have actually made it less likely that Obamacare will ever be undone.